I wanted to bring to your attention a major problem Aperture users are experiencing. Like many others when Aperture was released I ordered a new PowerMac to be able to run Aperture. At the time the nVIDIA GeForce 6600 was a recommended video card.
With the release of Aperture 1.1 the minimum system requirements have jumped up quite a bit.
While he GeForce 6600 is still “supported” with 1.1 the issue is that it used to be a “recommended” card with Aperture 1.0 and now it is part of the “minimum system requirements” just barely making the minimum. I purchased the PowerMac specifically to use with Aperture.
While I do not expect Apple to maintain full backwards system compatibility I think this is certainly excessive. As it currently stands Aperture is painfully slow and all indications are the only fix is upgrading my graphics card to the GeForce 7800 GT.
Unfortunately Apple will not sell this card alone nor do they provide an upgrade path. I along with many other users have discussed this on the Aperture mailing list and we are hoping to group together a sufficient number of users to help encourage Apple to offer an upgrade option to the GeForce 7800 or take my system back and I will order a new one with the GeForce card. The discussion is available online at here.
Contributed by: Alex Rodriguez

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With machines like the MacBook Apple has come a long way in closing the price gap between it and its PC competitors. But there’s still a large divide with some of their peripherals that is simply too hard to justify, specifically: monitors.
Read the rest of the story on my ZDNet Blog: The Apple Core.

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Following many prototype mock-ups, here is the first working model of the One Laptop Per Child project, unveiled at the Seven Countries Task Force Meeting yesterday in all its ‘Fisher Price, My First Laptop Computer’ glory, along with a number of ‘nearly finished’ prototypes.
Nicholas Negroponte (co-founder of MIT Media Lab, writer of Being Digital) heads up the OLPC organisation whose vision is to provide every child in developing countries with a laptop computer.
The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, with a dual-mode display – both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3x the resolution. The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports (that’s what the cute ‘ears’ cover when in the ‘down’ position.Read More…
Contributed By: Brett Jordan

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An article on ARS Technica disputes the claim that MacBook Pros run cooler by reducing the amount of thermal grease that Apple applies to the chips in the machine:

James Duncan Davidson of O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter recently explored the issue, disassembling his own MacBook Pro, removing and reapplying paste, measuring the effects, and laboriously documenting all the details as he went. In the end, after of all the effort, he got a (drumroll, please) 2 degree temperature reduction! Now, you will be quick to point out that many others have gotten signficantly better results and you’d be right. Davidson has some ideas on that. It seems that in reassembling his computer, he accidentally disconnected the heat pipe sensor. The computer responded to this by running ALL FANS! ALL THE TIME! ALL NUDE! (okay, maybe not actually nude) and making the MacBook Pro delightfully cool. It was only after getting annoyed by the fan noise that he discovered the sensor problem. Upon hooking it up, he got the noise under control and saw the temperature climb up to near the original levels. Bummer!